The ARPANET Project

The ARPANET online display and digital library is a project of the J. Willard Marriott Library Digital Scholarship Lab.

In 1969, The University of Utah Computer Science Department became the fourth node on the ARPANET, a Defense Department project that evolved into the Internet and World Wide Web. Since the University was an early-adopter of this technology that changed the world, the Library wanted to identify historical materials about the University's role in Internet history and solve the mystery of why there was so little information about this famous event in our archives. Through Project MUSE (My Utah Signature Experience) the Marriott Library Digital Scholarship Lab was able to hire an undergraduate intern to help identify relevant library materials and create an online display. The intern worked with librarians to conduct oral history interviews and search library special collections for relevant documents in order to create a digital collection. As an added benefit, the Library was able to acquire and digitize a large set of historic technical reports that had been stored in a closet at the School of Computing.